About "Music to Listen to with Eyes Closed" — Zen and Music?

 

In a few words, I'd like to explain the project behind my new album.

For some time now, my music has been trying to achieve a certain minimalism, leaving its place to silence, slowness and a form of “controlled randomness”, playing with shifts and superimpositions of motifs in a certain indeterminacy. 

I don't proceed by algorithms or abstract schemes, as John Cage might have done with the divinatory schemes of the I'Ching, but by listening and editing, stretching the time and inverting certain MIDI tracks, and deleting certain notes in these tracks to create zones of silence.

This phase of my musical work corresponds to the music I'm currently listening to: Morton Feldman, John Cage, Somei Satoh, Toru Takemitsu, Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveiros. I'm still a big fan of San Francisco's “New Albion” label, which played a major role in the dissemination of American contemporary and experimental music in particular...

                                                 (Snapshot of my current playlist at home...)

For me, slowness goes hand in hand with the deepening of sound, microvariations and repetitions of certain motifs, creating a thread that takes time to unfold. The minimalism of the playing and sound palette goes hand in hand with the interweaving of different sound planes and the slow displacement of sounds in stereophonic space. This aspect fascinates me, because in a way it gives life and movement to the music, and I see in it an analogy with the slowly rotating celestial vault in a planetarium, or the fluid movements of goldfish turning in the pond of a Japanese garden...

Basically, I think I'm trying to transpose my attraction to Zen Buddhism into music: a kind of immersion in listening and the present moment, here and now, letting thoughts run away, letting images and sensations come and go without trying to control them, as the music breathes.

 Through music, I seek to create an immersive, floating listening space that can be heard at different sound levels, at different times of the day. It's basically a return to the profound nature of ambient music, as theorized by Brian Eno, after Erik Satie...

I know that Buddhism was also a source of inspiration for John Cage, Takemitsu, Philip Glass, Eliane Radigue, Meredith Month, and, in the ambient genre, for Robert Rich and others...

Of course, I don't pretend to compare myself to these great names, I simply try to progress along the same path, towards the stripping down of sound, the opening up of listening, and a contemplative, even meditative approach to musical creation.

I'd be delighted if you had the curiosity and time to listen to “Music to Listen to with Eyes Closed”, which is an attempt to move in this direction, and to let me know your impressions, and your criticisms, however harsh!